Deeplinks Blog posts about Copyright Trolls

A Virginia district court is the latest to call out a copyright troll for using a business model designed to be little more than a shakedown operation to extract quick and easy settlements from hundreds of thousands of John Doe defendants. Judge Gibney says it far better than we could:

In what is becoming a well-settledpattern, Righthaven again finds itself on the losing end of a motion, with its case thrown out and owing the defendant – here, Leland Wolf, proprietor of the It Makes Sense Blog – costs and attorneys' fees for bringing a baseless copyright case. The lawsuit, Righthaven v. Wolf, is also notable for being the leading case among more than 50 that were filed in Colorado. Pending a motion to dismiss, the Colorado court stayed the remaining cases.

Copyright troll Righthaven's flawed business model—suing hundreds of bloggers and small websites for dubious cases of alleged copyright infringement of newspaper articles—appears to be grinding to an inexorable finish. But even as the Righthaven cases prove that litigation isn't going to magically make print media profitable in the age of the Internet, a new generation of journalists and creators are adapting to the digital world—including one of Righthaven's former clients.

Today, Northern District of Texas District Court Judge David C. Godbey granted EFF's and Public Citizen's sanctions motion against Evan Stone, attorney for Mick Haig Productions, who improperly issued subpoenas to ISPs without court permission in order to obtain the identities of alleged file sharers. The court's blistering opinion speaks for itself, and should be read in full. The court includes a brief overview of its findings thusly:

In keeping with a growing trend, this week Federal Judge Bernard Zimmerman of the Northern District of California severed 5,010 Doe Defendants from a single case—effectively dismissing all but one defendant. EFF participated in the case as amicus.

This case, like many we’ve seen around the country, involved a pornographic work. Plaintiff sued more than 5,000 individuals anonymously based only on their ISP addresses, for allegedly exchanging an infringing file over a BitTorrent network. The copyright owner claimed that participation in BitTorrent “swarm” was a form of conspiracy, meaning it could sue everyone at once in California.